Thursday, August 9. 2007

I have noticed on any Vista computer installed on a domain will experience a long delay between entering credentials and being able to launch programs.

Non-domain joined Vista installs would never experience this behavior. No matter what tweaks were made to the scripts and/or GPO settings, the delays still occurred.

Well, according to this KB article, it looks like I'm not the only one that has run into this problem.

To avoid this delay, create the DWORD registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\DelayedDesktopSwitchTimeout

The KB article recommends 5 for a value, which shortens the delay from 30 seconds to 5 seconds. The truely impatient could always set this value to 1.

Even though the article mentions that "Run logon scripts synchronously" GPO must be enabled to this experience problem, real world experience has shown that this "tweak" works even when that particular GPO is disabled.